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Dare to hope

Following on from what I wrote yesterday I’m trying to put it in true perspective. I reckon half the time you think you know what you think or feel, but even then it’s not always true. You’re apt to get caught out. Something happens and exposed is a previously secret emotion. You approach things rationally and logically and that’s perfectly fine except you don’t lived in a pure, untainted environment. In the real world good intentions and considered expectations get derailed by unexpected twists and irrational responses and, heaven forbid, your own sense of human feeling.

I know all this. I’m a very rational man but I’d be dumb if I didn’t factor in an often irrational world. So, I try never to be categorical. Black and white is a no-no. I have inclinations and preferences. I have notions and the odd hypothesis. Ultimately I trust more what I do than what I actually think.

It’s funny how we can be disconnected from our own doing. It’s as if there’s another realm wherein the body takes over. So you think this, but actually you do that. WTF? Yet you have to respect it. So many times this has been true in my experience.

This girl is a decent example. I’ve been hanging in there for a while and gone through different permutations of emotion. Sometimes I’ve been hopeful, other times upset, sometimes angry and occasionally exasperated. They’ve been the variables, but I’ve tracked well tracked the same line. Fair enough.

Now I’m just a bloke and by bread a bloke does not live alone. So while I’m yearning, while it’s still yet to happen and may never, I figure I can satisfy my needs elsewhere. That’s the theory. In fact – though I often feel great desire and am almost always straining at the leash – when it comes down to it I have no real urge to do something about it. Bless my cotton socks, but I want to stay pure – there’s a lot of me on the edge, but I really am a romantic, sensitive character to.

I say that – and yet, this is what I want to figure out. I actually had a very brief but pleasurable episode with a much younger woman about ten days ago. It was fun, guilt free, just what I needed. Then on Friday I’m sitting with another woman and I’m wondering if I can take this further and I know, I just know, that I don’t want to. I make my excuses and extricate myself. On the train home I rationalise it that it’s too complicated – and by that her place or mine, and the conversation on top of it – and of course I know it’s bullshit. I think of the few occasions when I’ve knocked back sex and how always afterwards I would shake my head in wonder: what happened there? In actual fact that was me being an adult, not a kid.

As I pondered deeper I realised that I didn’t want an episode of convenience. I’m past that banality. I want something real and felt, and fair enough now, and maybe overdue too. So how then do I account for the episode? I felt it, but what I felt wasn’t tenderness or affection and certainly not love, what I felt was a spiky desire. It started flirting and joking and suddenly it happened – it spontaneous and unexpected, therefore it was real.

I reflect on this as I consider A. I absolve myself of anything inappropriate, even had I gone with the woman on Friday. That’s the rough and tumble and life and I’m under no obligation. I choose to feel some obligation though because that’s what I want. I want that tie, that bond, that connection. I’ve never understood open relationships because what to me is some of the central tenets of love are done away with – faith, expectation, shared and poignant experience. To pour yourself into one other, and one only, and from here till eternity, well that’s my ideal.

I hope that happens. I hope the day comes when I can share some of this with her. Of course, there are many things I want to share – that’s what you crave when you become close to another. I want to crack myself open for her so she can read over my entrails. And vice versa. This is a different dimension altogether, much, much different to these transient episodes, even the highly satisfying. This is what I want I think, and what my body does too. We are in accord because the behavioural barriers between us are dissolving. It’s no longer purely hypothetical; I have entered into and accepted my own human feeling. And, perhaps too, as she.

She is shining now. I’ve never seen her like this before. She’s ebullient. I dare to hope.